With few flights and even fewer passengers, airlines face a
wave of challenges unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic. Some airlines have
gone out of business, and others are barely surviving as global passenger
volume hovers at around 50 percent of 2019 levels.
اضافة اعلان
Without passengers to fill them, airlines have been retiring
their older aircraft faster than normal. The more than 1,400 planes airplanes
parked in 2020 that might not return to service is more than twice as many
aircraft as would customarily be retired in a single year, according to a
10-year aviation forecast by Oliver Wyman, a business consulting firm. The
result will be a more modern fleet, the report states.
In a glass-half-full observation, David Marty, head of
digital solutions marketing at
Airbus, noted that planes remaining in airlines’
fleets are younger, more fuel-efficient aircraft, with lower carbon dioxide
emissions.
New engine technology and lighter structures and components
help the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 burn 20 to 25 percent less fuel than
the planes they replace, according to the manufacturers.
The other significant change is digital. Each new generation
of aircraft can collect more data with sensors and circuitry that — like a
giant Fitbit — tracks the airplane’s health from nose to tail.
On any flight, for example, an airline can calculate how
much carbon it is emitting and what plane components may need attention on
arrival.
As the percentage of modern aircraft in airline fleets
increases, the amount of data available also rises. And the airplane is just
one contributor to the growing flow of information.
“The world is clearly changing, and airplanes are definitely
providing more and more information,” said Vincent Capezzuto, chief technology
officer for
Aireon, an aircraft tracking and surveillance company.
New broadcast tracking signals are flight specific but can
also contribute information useful for air-navigation services and
airport-arrival planning to help manage the flow of traffic in the skies and at
the airports.
In one novel use, Aireon has been hired by the Federal
Aviation Administration to monitor all Boeing 737 Max flights to capture any
anomalies for analysis. This is in response to the nearly two-year grounding of
the Max after two deadly crashes. The Max returned to service at the end of
last year. (Some of the planes were grounded again this month because of a
potential electrical problem.)
To show how fast change has come, Kevin Michaels, managing
director of AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consultancy, points to the
newest Airbus airliner, the A350. It typically records 800 megabytes of data
per flight. The Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger airliner, which
began operation in 2007, can provide only half of that.
“There’s a lot more data available and better algorithms,”
Michaels said.
At Delta Air Lines, new technology has led the airline to
create apps that pilots use on a tablet such as Flight Weather Viewer to avoid
flying through turbulence. First launched in 2016, that app has been updated
over the years as new capabilities became available.
Delta's Flight Family Communication app, started in 2018,
lets all employees working on a specific flight communicate among themselves,
from ground crews to flight crews. John Laughter, the airline’s chief of
operations, says one of the best uses of the new data is predicting when parts
will fail so maintenance can be done proactively.
“I’ve been at Delta since 1993, and almost everything we did
then was looking backwards,” he said. “We’d have a failure and we’d ask, ‘How
do we fix it?’”
Today, Laughter says “data scientists are looking at the
data” so they can schedule what would previously have been an unscheduled and
potentially disruptive repair.
Executives at Malaysia’s AirAsia say preventing delays is
critical because their business model depends on planes spending no more than
25 minutes at the airport gate. Since 10 entities have a hand in dispatching a
flight, anything that slows the progress of one of those people can trigger a
cascade of delays.
By applying artificial intelligence to the data it collects,
AirAsia has also been able to find small reductions in fuel and labor costs
that add up, said Javed Malik, the airline’s group chief operations officer.
“At the end of the year, that can save millions,” Malik
said.
Global companies such as Airbus, Google and IBM have found a
potentially lucrative market selling tech services to airlines because the
carriers, some of which have been around for a century, are locked into what
Vik Krishnan, a partner with McKinsey & Company, which specializes in the
travel sector, calls “antiquated” systems.
Newer airlines, such as AirAsia, aren’t trapped by that
history. It was just 5 years old when its current owners bought it in 2001.
After adding a long-haul carrier and acquiring a handful of affiliate regional
airlines, the company decided to merge its disparate data and create what Malik
calls a “connected ecosystem.”
The airline wanted all its information accessible under one
roof and visibility across departments so that, for example, a passenger’s
biometric information — such as fingerprints or facial recognition — could be
used not only for security and boarding at the airport, but for purchasing
products on AirAsia’s e-commerce platforms. This use of technology could create
privacy issues that governments may need to address.
“Those are separate, different technologies — payment and
biometrics that need to work seamlessly in the background so the customer gets
a great experience,” Malik said.
In 2018, AirAsia partnered with Google to become one of the
first airlines to move its data to the cloud, and more airlines have followed.
Delta and IBM announced a deal this year to move both customer and in-house
apps to the public cloud while they work on strategies for handling increasing
amounts of aircraft information.
“Airlines have a greater capacity to use the data or process
it or deploy artificial intelligence as they sift through and glean the
information they need,” said Dee Waddell, IBM’s global managing director for
travel and transportation industries.
But as they fly farther into the digital age, airlines are
also learning that being part of big data is not without its downsides,
including the burden of managing it all.
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